Union Square Ventures Invests In European Blogging Service Zemanta

Union Square Ventures adds another blogging-related software company to their portfolio: The VC firm's latest investment is Slovenia- and London-based Zemanta, a service that makes blogging "simpler and easier," according to USV's Fred Wilson:

Currently, Zemanta suggests stories/posts/research you might want to read as you compose your post, images you might want to include in the post, words you might want to hyperlink out with, and tags for search engines and other services to use to discover your content. A number of us at Union Square Ventures have been using the Zemanta service for several months and we universally like it and have found that we feel less equipped when we try to blog without it. I used the Zemanta service to add the related links at the end of this post and several of the links in it.

Why invest in Zemanta? Wilson is particularly interested in the recommendation engine -- "AdWords for content creators" -- and says he's eager to see Zemanta open that engine to other Web apps and services, like text and graphical ads, affiliate links, video, quotes, music, etc.

USV joins UK investors Eden Ventures and The Accelerator Group for Zemanta's seed round; the investment will fund a U.S.-based bizdev team in the SF and NY areas.

By the way, have you heard of any other US-based VCs investing in Slovenia? Fred hasn't:

This is our second investment in Europe and it is possibly the first investment in a Slovenian tech company by a US venture capital investor. So we are making a bit of history here and that's exciting too. The founders of Zemanta, Boštjan Špetič and Andraž Tori, are leading members of the Slovenian tech community and have built an amazing team of developers.